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leisure moments for self-indulgence. The girls whom he ran into in connection with his Party activities were just as busy as he was, or burdened with private cares or, for the most part, already married. Brought up in the poorer sections Montmartre, he had been accustomed from his youth to think that when he grew up and began to earn his own living, he would, like other males of his class, satisfy his physical needs by paying regular visits to one of those houses with the little red lamp burning above the door. And, like the others, he could hardly wait for the day when he would begin to earn his own living. Life gave him no chance for romance, no inkling of the love that transcends the flesh and makes of a woman's body an altar. Having no intimate contact with girls except in the stews of Paris, he imagined that all women were alike. A woman's virtue, he was certain, was man's greatest invention; it existed only in the minds of idealists and poets.

Later, when he had become disgusted with the counterfeit love on sale behind those marked doors, he would lie awake at night, yearning for a true relationship, for a spiritual as well as physical fulfillment.

Of all the girls who appeared on his horizon two appealed to him most strongly. These were Anna and Mary. He had never stopped to figure out which of the two he cared for more. One supplemented the other. He liked the quiet and calm of Anna, but Mary's humor and vivacity pleased him too.

Nevertheless, he had never given the slightest inkling of his feelings to either of them, postponing any declaration for a later time, perhaps one of the quiet Saturday afternoons during the summer, on a picnic somewhere, away from the city's noise and heat, where a human being could be natural and unrestrained. There, among spacious fields in the